I arrived in Sheffield in September, 2012 to take up a lectureship in Nineteenth-Century Literature and was appointed Senior Lecturer in January 2016. I am general secretary of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK & Ireland): http://asle.org.uk/; co-director of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

Research

My research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late Victorian period. My first monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explored the representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. My second book was the co-authored volume Walrus for the Reaktion Animal series. I am now working towards my next monograph, Once Upon a Time I was—ALIVE: Fur and Fiction from Cooper to Kafka . Other work currently in progress includes co-edited collections on Henry Rider Haggard; on wolves, werewolves and the gothic; and on animals in detective fiction.

Teaching

In 2016-17 I will be teaching on:

LIT3101: Romantic and Victorian Prose

LIT115: Darwin, Marx, Freud

LIT6045: Humans, Animals, Monsters and Machines from Gulliver’s Travels to King Kong

LIT271: Radical Theory

LIT108: Studying Poetry

LIT207: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Supervision

I would be very happy to supervise projects relating to any aspect of my research, particularly animals and/or ecology in Victorian literature and culture, adventure fiction, the Arctic, and literature and colonialism/postcolonialism/globalization.

Public engagement

I have a strong interest in the links between environmental aesthetics, conceptions of environmental and species value and public policy. I organised open sessions on these and related topics at the conferences Modern Environments: Contemporary Readings in Green Studies at the University of Glasgow in 2007 and Activism, Apocalypse, and the Avant-Garde at the University of Edinburgh in 2008. In 2015, as part of Sheffield’s Festival of Arts and Humanities, I ran a day of events under the title Caring for Sheffield’s Woodlands.

With Ruth Hawthorn, ‘Tattoos, Deviance and Consumer Culture in North American Television: Criminal Minds, CSI: NY and Law and Order’. Tattoos in Crime and Detection Narratives. Eds. Kate Watson and Katharine Cox, Manchester University Press, 2017.

‘Zooheterotopias’. The Globalization of Space: Foucault and Heterotopia. Eds. John Miller and Mariangela Palladino. Pickering and Chatto, 2015, pp. 149-164.

‘Meat, Cannibalism and Humanity in Paul du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, or, What Does a Gorilla Hunter Eat for Breakfast?’ Special Edition on ‘European and Italian EcoGothic in the Long 19th Century’. Gothic Studies, 201316. 1, 2014, pp. 70-84.